Recently I graduated from Collide Village accelerator with my food tech startup FiveOH. The Collide Village is a milestone-driven accelerator where they invest in startups, teach them about evidence-based entrepreneurship and help founders brand and commercialize their innovations.
Here are some key things I learned from the program.
1 – Customer development is hard but worth it
Getting out of the building and talking to customers is time-consuming and requires you to step out of your comfort zone. You understandably don’t want to be proven wrong. BUT you can also learn what people’s challenges and pain points are and what they need. Now, why would you want to build a business without knowing that?
2 – You can’t argue with the data
Once you collect the data, all arguments stop. Data will tell you what you need to build next. It can take a lot of time and money to build a startup. Life is short and money is kind of important, so you don’t want to waste either.
3 – But data is not enough
We can’t just stop after collecting data. Once you have the data, turn it into insights so you can learn from it. When I noticed that 70% of our traffic was coming from Facebook, I double downed on Facebook and made it my priority.
4 – Don’t hate the pain
You learn the most on your painful days. Tuesday was our longest day during the program. We would present our weekly findings to the mentors and teams. It was also the day I learned the most. So many “aha” moments and “How come I didn’t think of that” moments happened on Tuesdays.
5 – Keep on learning
Not everybody will agree with your POV but its ok. Try to be a sponge and absorb everything. If everybody agrees with you, how would you learn new things?
5.5 – Taking action
The more action I took, next steps became clear. There were number of sleepless nights but it was all worth it. This gets 0.5 points because I kind of knew this already 🙂
So now over to you? Have you been a part of startup accelerator program? What did you learn?